US Army band’s tribute to Greek War of Independence
A video uploaded Thursday by the US Army Europe and Africa Band & Chorus shows a band of US soldiers playing, and singing, the Zalongo Dance.
The video was in tribute to the bicentennial of the Greek War of Independence.
The song refers to an earlier uprising against the Ottoman rule, in 1803, where women from Epirus, now in Greece’s northwest, threw their children off a steep cliff and then jumped themselves rather than surrender to the Ottoman Army. It was composed in local folk-style by a Greek writer, Spyros Peresiadis, as part of a theater drama on the 100th anniversary of that uprising.
Notice the singer’s perfect delivery, with almost no trace of an accent.
